excerpted from

Oleander Leaf Burn

a novel

by

Stillson Graham

If you could say that Julian Barre had a prize possession, it would be his pickup truck. A blue that matched his jeans, with silver designs across each side which he stopped noticing days after he bought it. It was a 1985 Chevy bought new with the money his dad left him when he died. He was 16 and still in high school, a stupid, reckless age that he was always amazed he managed to live through.

Now half a life later, another 16 years, he sat on the edge of highway 152 just east of Gilroy. The grinding of the tow-truck’s winch drowned out the desperate creaking and moaning of the sliced and shattered metal hulk that was once that same truck.

He watched as it was lifted up and onto the back of the flatbed; he watched as it drove away into the morning air, turning right and then out of sight. He would never see it again. Left alone once again on the highway, he was suddenly aware of the denim jacket on the skin of his arms, of the tiny moustache scratching at his upper lip.

In addition to numerous slips of paper and small articles of clothing, he lost his virginity in that truck. Learned to drive. Learned about his father’s failing eyesight and his grandmother’s death.

The driver of the tow truck asked if he could take him anywhere, but Julian wasn’t in a hurry. He was on his way to a botany seminar in San Francisco - WCB (West Coast Botanists) – a throng of botanists all sniggering over spicy drinks.

Q: What’s the difference between single-celled organisms and botanists?
A: The single-celled organisms have lives.

Q: How do you tell meteors from biologists?
A: Meteors shower occasionally.

Q: Why can’t more than one botanist read a newspaper at a time?
A: They always disagree over the classifieds.

He pictured himself vaguely laughing, vaguely smiling, and making some kind of noise that wouldn’t offend anyone who might be telling the joke.

He had no wish to see any of them sooner than he had to. It was nice being alone in a strange place, anyway. It gave him a sense of belonging with and to the world. Left alone on the side of the highway, he could smell garlic from the surrounding farms – although a pungent odor at best, it was comforting.

He started to feel a little jarred from the accident. The adrenaline released almost two hours earlier was just now making his hands shake, having before given him clarity of thought. Now that was gone and his hands felt like they were attached to small electric motors.

The accident was a particularly stupid one. He had stopped to piss by the side of the road, probably on some rancher’s land who would never know but probably always suspected such things about passers by. A larger pickup, an oversized pickup – one of those trucks with the passenger compartment extended – a diesel, silver, with some kind of logo or inscription on the door, had sideswiped his own pickup and caused it to slam into a tree. The larger truck sped off, leaving him with both his mouth and his zipper wide open.

He saw the whole thing. He thought he heard the clunking sound of a diesel engine – a noise he recognized and always congratulated himself that he recognized – and turned to look. The larger truck approached from the east, suddenly veered onto the shoulder, swerved as if it were trying to avoid something on the highway and smashed into the side of his own truck. Then, already severely damaged, his pickup ran headlong into a wide oak tree half a second later. But the time it took for his truck to be impacted and then itself impact another object – in this case, a 80-100 year-old quercus lobata – seemed longer. The tree was scraped bare of bark in a few spots, but it would survive. It would slowly bleed sap for a few months and then carry on as if nothing had happened.